Poetry is a city of words, a complex heterogeneity that functions both as its parts and as a whole. It’s full of systems—metaphoric, symbolic, sonic—analogous to the sewage, electrical, and transportation systems that animate a city. You look at a jagged skyline, and see the ragged right margin; you read through the quick shifts of much contemporary poetry, and think of a busy intersection in which your view is cut off by a bus one moment, then opened up the next, and then filled with a crowd crossing the street the next.
—Cole Swenson, "Poetry City," Identity Theory, (Oct. 26, 2004, identitytheory.com)
1 comment:
How different is Bergson's definition of poetry, more attuned to graceful rhythms and enticing images (a view dearer to my heart): "The poet is he with whom feelings develop into images, and the images themselves into words which translate them while obeying the laws of rhythm. In seeing these images pass before our eyes we in our turn experience the feeling which was, so to speak, their emotional equivalent: but we should never realize images so strongly without the regular movements of the rhythm by our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet" (Time and Free Will)
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